Gain

The way I describe this book when I am trying to convince friends to read it is that it's two intersecting cross sections of our way of life. The main story is a horizontal section taken through the life of an ordinary woman, a single mother trying to get by as a real estate agent in a small company town. This story is told in parallel with the history of the company itself, a Poctor & Gamble-esque megacorporation. The key driver of the story is that the woman gets cancer and blames the company plant, but this is not a book about the heroic cancer victim campaigning against corporate evil, but how the way we live, the decisions we make, and go we got to be here interact in a kind of inevitability. There is a moment, which I will try not to spoil, in the book, which is almost a literary frozen pan. Suddenly the narrative freezes and Powers describes a vertical cross section of a moment. How a typical product got to be at a particular place and time. Then the story continues to its inevitable conclusion. Not a happy book, but a compelling an thought-provoking one.